What HHI is needed for this lifestyle in the area?
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Anonymous
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1.5 mil house in a desirable zip code
Private school for 2 kids 2 cars, one should be luxury: think bmv or Audi 1 internal trip per year; skiing trip in the winter for the whole family Fully funded 401k and IRAs Fully funded college funds for the kids 1 mil? |
Anonymous
| No, probably $600k |
Anonymous
| I think $1m is about right. |
Anonymous
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Ok I'll play
Say it's $600k net: $300k Mortgage $85k Cars $24k Private for 2: $100k Vacation: $25k 401k $20k Living expenses: $100k College savings: $25k Savings $21k $1m would allow for more travel and savings and maybe a second home. |
Anonymous
If you are used to paying private tuition out of pocket, you don’t have to save as much for college as you can pay a good chunk out of pocket too. |
Anonymous
Did you intend to say net $400k bc the expenses you listed are way over $300k. |
Anonymous
Naw. This is us, to a T. House is 1.7M 2 kids both private 2 cars, one a porche, one a Toyota Christmas trip is to Aspen every year $15K Max 401Ks Fully funded college hard to say, but $200K in each and the kids are 6 and 8. We did it on $400K with difficulty and by the time we got to $600K with room to spare. |
Anonymous
How did you save up for the downpayments for your home? |
Anonymous
| This is mostly us too (not in DC, but in a HCOL area in CA on par with DC). House was 1.5M (bought three years ago, now worth $2M+) and we have enough for everything listed at around $950K HHI, with money left over to save for potentially purchasing an income property. However, DH is considering a new job that would bring our HHI down to about $650K and I think we would still be able to afford everything comfortably other than the future rental property. |
Anonymous
Did you *pay* $1.7M for the house, or did you roll over equity from an appreciating house? And what is tuition? |
Anonymous
I mean….my house is worth about $1.6m now. I think we are in a desirable zip code. We are walkable to Sidwell, NCS, and St. Albans. But our house is a side by side. It’s fine, but it is by no means luxurious, So not sure that’s what you are looking for, but it’s what you’d get in my zip code for $1.5. Our HHI is $400k. We originally paid $1.1m for the house. We don’t care about luxury cars, we don’t drive anywhere anyway. We can take 1-2 nice trips a year. We usually do ME and somewhere else like Copper Mountain or another ski place in UT or WY. We haven’t traveled internationally since having kids as our youngest was 4 when COVID hit. We fully fund our 401ks and have since well before we reached this income level. Kids 529s will have approximately $250k each by the time they reach college. With that and cash flow we expect to leave them debt free for undergrad. There’s no way we could add 2 private school tuitions. We could maybe do one but it would have to be at the expense of the travel for sure and would reduce our outside of 529s and 401ks savings to basically nothing. With another $150k we could afford private school for 2 and not compromise anything else. Except the cars because I just can never justify luxury cars in the city regardless of income. |
Anonymous
This is the big question mark. Are you buying at $1.5 or living in a $1.5M house? If you're buying, is it your first house, or are you rolling in equity from a previous place (or two)? Because people in $1.5M houses are all over the place in terms of income. The rest of this you could do on $400k, but you wouldn't have much of a brokerage account because of the private schools. |
Anonymous
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I would say you need a 800k income.
We used to have a 600k income and would not have been able to do all that. We travel more though. |
Anonymous
We are at $500k, do most of the things on this list except we live in a $1M house and use public schools, and put $12k/month directly into a brokerage. We could ostensibly put another $2k into a bigger mortgage and the rest to 2 private school tuitions. I would not choose to do so, but it's certainly economically feasible. |
Anonymous
Except if you are making that much money, maybe you don't want to be still working by the time the kids are in college. It doesn't seem very smart to pay for private and not save for college counting on high income in the future. |